Reflection on ETL503

It was somewhat ambitious, I now realise, to have enrolled in a Summer Semester at CSU in ETL503 and EER500.  To have to contend with all the end of year celebrations with my two children's schools, all my work break ups (three different workplaces), husband's work dos, family get togethers, friend gatherings, Christmas shopping and setting up the Christmas tree and lights was all too much to fit in together with having to research and write two 2,500 word assignments due within a week of each other.  The toughest thing was finding the discipline not to drink too much in order to maintain a clear head for reading and writing something coherent.

ETL503 has taught me a lot about the really hard work of a librarian.  It was also one of the most interesting tasks to source worthwhile resources.  I was lucky to teach at an institution where there is a very wise and experienced librarian who told me to "choose an area you are interested in and find resources for that.  Start at the Reference shelf".  So I did.  With a degree in Fine Art (Painting)  the choice was easy. Finding one 1970 edition Encyclopaedia of Art, I was on my way to the Art Department where they were talking about introducing a new subject for which new resources were imperative.  I loved looking through book catalogues, reading about DVDs CD-ROMs and discovering online databases and catalogues for schools with reviews of resources.  Studio Art for Year 10s is going to be a great subject.  I was lucky to go an excursion to the Ian Potter Gallery on one of my teaching jobs and have a tour by a very helpful guide who helped suggest a tool for resources I had never thought of : University Courses and Lecturers' booklists and catalogues and resources they had created themselves.

The thing that is most memorable is having to keep in mind relevance, suitablitity and outcomes.  It emphasised the importance of teacher librarians knowing the curriculum and so knowing what teachers and students need.

I learnt a lot from EER500 as well.  It was really interesting to look into educational research questions, and the discipline of framing questions within a framework of established methods.  The research out there is fascinating.  Again, choosing something I was interested in - reading and ESL students - really helped, so the focus for my reading and that of the other students' - study habits and social networking - was quite enjoyable to write on.

Waiting for results is almost as hard as writing the papers.  But at least I can have a drink now!  Well for a week anyway before staring the next two assignments.

ETL503 and EER500

It was very ambitious to have enrolled in both EER500 and ETL503 over the Summer Semester at CSU.  With trying to fit in Christmas break ups for three work places, as well as my husband's, all the end of year celebrations for the children's schools, family gatherings, friends get togethers, ordering school books for next year and getting the Christmas tree and lights up while completing two 2,500 word assignments was, in retrospect, mad. 
I learned a lot from the ETL503 assignment about the importance for teacher librarians of knowing the curriculum. The librarian at one of my schools wisely suggested starting with an area of interest, so I looked at the art book collection on the shelves, and decided to visit the art teacher.  He was trying to write a study guide for a new year 10 subject, Studio Art, and need to think about resources.  So I offered to help.
It was a little off centre looking for art resources, because they were hard to  find on the usual selection tools like ebscohost and SCIS, so I turned to the National Library and to University selection catalogues. A fortuitously timed excursion to the Ian Potter Gallery gave me the opportunity to source items from the art gallery catalogue and online teaching tools they create for schools and teachers.
EER500 was also really interesting. Discovering the framework around methods for research and the wide range of educational research that is being conducted was quite a journey. Choosing something I am interested in - reading and ESL students - as well as finding the research done by another student into study habits and social networking sites was enjoyable.
Now that the assignments have been submitted, there is only worry about the grades.
Now to the next module reading and assignments!
Merry Christmas!
Lisa Tabone

ETL401 Portfolio Task C

Task C:  A critical synthesis of your reflection on how your view of the role of the teacher librarian may have changed during this subject.  This should include examples captured from your personal blog and from participation in the ETL401 Forum (about 750 words)

My view on the role of the Teacher Librarian (TL) has changed in two main ways.  Firstly, in terms of the breadth of tasks they perform, and secondly, in terms of the perceived “change” in their role.  While the tools TLs use have changed, and are constantly changing, the central role of creating an environment for the whole school community to become effective and ethical users of information (Johnson, 2002, p.4) and technology to meet their academic and life-long needs has not.

Teacher librarians are multi-taskers.  As well as managing staff (if they are lucky), organizing the physical library space, creating booklists, cataloguing and issuing books and resources, conducting reference interviews to assist staff and students in research, providing technical support with the vast array of materials, acquiring materials, balancing budgets, providing usage data that ensures the ongoing accreditation of the entire school, TLs are, above all, professional researchers. (http://singinglibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/what-does-a-librarian-do-all-day-)

TLs are proactive advocates of their profession and to do this, they must have credibility (Haycock, 2007, p.28) within the whole school.  In order to gain the support of the principal as well as the wider school community (Oberg, 2006, p. 13), TLs actively promote their profession by demonstrating their knowledge of new technology, providing on-going staff development and are committed to helping teachers incorporate learning resources into the curriculum (Purcell, 2010, p.32). TLs energetically build relationships by collaborating with teachers in designing authentic learning tasks, and helping teachers and students locate resources (Herring, 2007, p.32).  Therefore, TLs are effective communicators who, with the support of the principal, have the trust and credibility of the wider school community.

TLs are instructional partners. That is they empower teachers to be more creative through their knowledge of new teaching materials and technology available in their subject area (Lamb and Johnson, 2008, p. 2). By collaboratively helping teachers design tasks and assessments, and to locate appropriate resources, they enhance the development of information literacy within the curriculum (Herring, 2007, p. 32).  TLs also address the research needs of students by producing an appealing, easy to use and effective Library homepage, including the Library URL on all assignments, developing a school intranet, and by creating subject pathfinders to help direct both students and teachers in locating the best resources for their curricular needs (Johnson, 2006-7,Herring (2007 p.37).

The role of the TL is, and always was, dynamic, but they continue to help people to find information.  TLs implement information literacy in schools.  In the 1980’s called 'library skills', this focused solely on students’ use of the school library.  ‘Information skills' (also referred to as 'study skills') focused on a wider set of skills used by students who were doing curriculum-related assignments. These skills included planning (e.g., concept mapping), information retrieval (e.g., search strategy), evaluation of sources (mainly books), interpretation, note taking and assignment writing. The term 'information literacy skills' began to be used more in the late 1990s and is not seen merely in terms of skills, however. While there is no agreement as to what exactly constitutes information literacy in schools, there is agreement that students not only have to practice skills but also to think about how and when they might use information literacy skills. (Johnson, 2002, p. 21).

TLs make students and teachers aware of the tools available to help them find and make sense of the vast array of information available through the Web. They also ensure the ethical as well as safe use of these tools.  TLs inform the school community of the models available for web site evaluation (Kathy Schrock’s The 5 Ws of Web site Evaluation 2009), and of information seeking strategies such as Herring’s PLUS model (1996 and 2004), Eisenberg and Berkowitz’s Big6 model (2010) and Kuhlthau’s Information Search Process (2004) model.  These information literacy models go beyond providing a set of skills for research, because they encourage effective, purposeful use as well as reflection and transfer of the skills to enable students to become competent but also responsible users of information.

TLs are educators above all.  As well as keeping up with current trends and new technological initiatives, modelling ICT such as interactive whiteboards in their teaching, (Herring, 2011, p.2) TLs continue to be responsible for the effective, safe and ethical use of information by the whole school community. TLs also encourage reading books for pleasure.

My view of the role of the TL has changed to a much deeper understanding of the breadth and diversity of the role as well as the great responsibility with which they are entrusted. However, I feel reassured that there is great enjoyment and satisfaction to be had from experiencing the “light-bulb moment” when students find what they were looking for and understand how to use it.  

References:

Haycock, K. (2007). Collaboration: Critical success factors for student learning. School Libraries Worldwide, 13(1), 25-35.

Herring, J. (2011) Improving Students’ Web Use and Information Literacy

Herring, J. (2007). Teacher librarians and the school library. In S. Ferguson (Ed) Libraries in the Twentyfirst Century: Charting new directions in information (pp. 27-42)

Johnson, D. (2006-7) Demonstrating our impact: Putting number in Context Part 1, Media Matter column Leading and Learning (2)

Johnson, D. (2002). Challenges: The seven most critical challenges facing our profession, Teacher Librarian, 29(5), 21-24.Retrieved from Ebscohost 26/09/2011

Lamb, A. & Johnson, L. (2008).  School library media specialist 2.0: a dynamic collaborator, teacher, and technologist in Teacher Librarian December Vol. 36 Issue 2 pp 74-78

Oberg, D. (2006). Developing the respect and support of school administrators. Teacher Librarian, 33(3), 13-18.

Purcell, M. (2010). All Librarians Do Is Check out Books, Right? A Look at the Roles of a School Library Media Specialist, in Library Media Connection, v29 n3 p30-33 Nov-Dec 2010. 4 pp

http://yclibrarynews.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/so-what-does-a-librarian-do-anyway/Accessed 1/10/2011

http://singinglibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/what-does-a-librarian-do-all-day-revisited/Accessed 1/10/2011

http://www.pbs.org/parents/booklights/archives/librarian-job-description/Accessed 1/10/2011

http://www.flickr.com/photos/78154370@N00/5761280491/sizes/l/in/photostream/Accessed 1/10/2011

Creating a Pathfinder

One of the tasks we have been asked to do for ETL 501 is to create a Pathfinder for a unit of work for a specific class.  The first challenge was to find a curriculum-related topic that was interesting.  For my previous assignment, I chose a literature based topic from my daughter's English class, so this time, I decided to find a unit of work from my son's year level.  As he was about to choose electives, I selected a Unit on Ancient Greek Civilization in which I was interested.
Having chosen my topic, I met with my ETL401/501 "study buddy" who showed me how to create a pathfinder wiki using wikispaces.com. based on advice from Herring's text book.  However, I found this very puzzling and couldn't handle the technology at all as it was all new to me.  After crying and profaning, I sought an alternative route into pathfinders by going into "google" and asking "How to create a pathfinder".  Mr. Google quickly led me to a template for pathfinders, which I found fairly easy to navigate around and its headings and organisation even made sense.  I started to enter information, but felt frustrated at not being able to master the creation of a wiki when my study buddy made it look so easy.
Several times I returned to my wikispace page, but each time left it having failed to achieve much.
My plan was to create the pathfinder on the template, save it into a word document and then trnsfer the information onto the wiki page once all my resources had been worked out.

At this stage, I had spent hours and hours and the task was becoming huge and completely overwhelming.  I was convinced that I was working unintelligently and inefficiently to say the least.

Information Literacy

Since reading about Information Literacy, I have learnt that we all need to find out information in order to function in society.  As society changes, so the information we need constantly changes.  If we are to learn new information, then we need to know how access that information.  There is functional literacy and there is information literacy.  In an educational setting, students need to be able to find out information in order to help them complete tasks, and in learning the skills to complete those tasks to transfer those skills to future tasks.  This is how they build upon their skills base and how they prepare themselves for the world of work by becoming independently information literate.

Reading About Information Literacy

Today, I decided to update my blog.  This is the first entry since I created it and I haven't had time to work out how to add an entry.  Hopefully, this will work, and I can now add to my blog.

So many people on the course seem to be on the ball and techno savvy that I feel quite inadequate.  Hopefully, with more trial and error, I can catch up.

Wish me luck everyone.

Lisa

Hello

This is to introduce me to blogging.  I am studying a Masters of Education in Teacher-Librarianship and have been required to start a blog.

This will be a steep learning curve for me.

Wish me luck.